Jesse Stone - Innocents Lost

Age Of Innocents

Jesse Stone - Innocents Lost
USA 2011 Directed by Dick Lowry 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone 1
 

Warning: Spoilers found. 

This one will probably be another fairly short review because, while I really do like these Jesse Stone thrillers, they’re quite formulaic in nature and, due to the constantly recurring characters, are almost more worth watching for their slight soap opera qualities as much as anything else... although there are still strong mystery elements, obviously. 

It turns out that Innocents Lost is the only entry in the series not to be directed by Robert Harmon but he gets a thanks in the credits and I suspect he may have been in unofficial consultation mode for this because he obviously cares about this series (and he does such a good job on them). This is another one not actually based on the books by Robert B Parker but, inspired by his characters. Also, I noticed that Tom Selleck, who plays Jesse Stone, gets the top half of the co-writing credit on this one... which actually makes a lot of sense on the dialogue level. And there’s a lot off recurring dialogue now on these pieces. Jesse has a lot of phrases he uses which sometimes come back as catchphrases every episode and even, in this one, has some ‘one off’ dialogue recalls from earlier pictures. Plus, as I said, there are a lot of recurring characters to shoehorn into the stories now and some of those also have their own catch phrases, such as ‘now ex’ felon Hasty Hathaway’s “I’m very fond of you Jesse.”, which he uses in each of the two scenes he gets in this one. 

The story is the usual double header but this one is slightly different in the way it’s initially parcelled out because, following on from the cliff hanger in No Remorse (reviewed here), Stone has been ‘forcibly retired’ from his role as the police chief of Paradise but Rose (Kathy Baker) and Suitcase (Kohl Sudduth) have been retained and the new chief of police, the son of the councilman who wanted Jesse out of his job, is hired. And, yeah, he’s an arrogant young man who is more interested in making profit and fending off bad publicity for the town rather than actually doing the police work. And, towards the end of the story, Suitcase also quits the Paradise police force, leaving only Rose and the new police chief to fend for themselves. 

So the main storylines are... firstly, the body of a girl who Stone was mentoring is found dead of a drug overdose in her car on the way back to Paradise to see Jesse. But he’s not officially on the case as that’s being handled by Rose and Suitcase (but, obviously, Jesse unofficially lends more than a helping hand and chasing down the how and why of the situation takes up most of his post-retirement time this episode). Meanwhile, the homicide chief of Boston (Stephen McHattie) once again calls on Jesse as a consultant to a homicide suspect who he doesn’t think did the murder... but who can’t get the man in custody to talk. Actually, there’s a kind of a leap of faith on the reason why the suspect withheld a key piece of evidence to clear himself of that crime but, it’s a bit of a stretch that he wouldn’t, given the two outcomes, I think. 

But the real highlight of the episode is, once again, Jesse trying to get closer and understand the dog he inherited from a murder victim from an earlier episode... he’s got him running after sticks now but he won’t bring them back and he still won’t jump onto Jesse’s bed beside him. This is the best stuff in these film’s in my opinion. 

Other than that, the only thing I will say is that Innocents Lost ends in Jesse killing someone who definitely deserved it. Once again, Jesse’s home is invaded by a man armed to the teeth at the end but, in this case, Jesse knows he’s coming because he’s followed his usual MO of having baited the man to do just that. So yeah, violent death comes to the home intruder who was a key player in the death of Jesse’s young friend. 

And that’s that.

 Innocents Lost is not the best of the Jesse Stone stories thus far but it doesn’t in any way let down the Harmon directed stories and it’s a good entry in the series. It also brings back the tradition, absent in the last few, of all the main cast members getting a highlight in the main credits as a bit of their footage plays out with the actor and character name thrown up with it... it was nice to see a return to that. So, two more to go and then it looks like I’m done with these (although I’m hearing that Hallmark channel in America may be developing a further two new ones with Tom Selleck at some point in the future).  

Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut

Under The Hood

Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut
USA 2009+ Directed by Zack Snyder
Warner Brothers/Paramount Pictures 
UK Blu Ray

Warning: Lots of spoilers, I’m sure

Watchmen was one of three heavily influential comic books of 1986 which kinda changed the face of comic books thereafter. They were DC’s Watchmen, DC’s The Dark Knight Returns and, to a lesser extent although it’s certainly not a lesser comic, Marvel’s Elektra Assassin. It’s said that because of the two DC titles, comic books finally grew up to reach a new adult audience. Which is actually a bit wrong or, as I would say myself, total nonsense. There were always Adult comics around such as the 1960s Underground Comics and even, of course, the Tijuana Bibles prevalent in the 1920s to 1960s (which are referenced in a neat scene in Watchmen). Not to mention stuff like Metal Hurlant (aka Heavy Metal) and Marvel imprints like Epic and the comic book magazine that it was named after.

So, to be a little more accurate, this was when superhero... or rather... costumed hero orientated comics grew up... at least in the mainstream. Now I was a year or two late to the party and so I read collected editions of these titles and a few other important landmarks during 1987 and 1988, generally perceived, as I said, as also being touch points for the maturation of the ‘four coloured funnies’. So I was also reading stuff like Batman - The Killing Joke, Blood - A Tale and Stray Toasters around this time. The comic was written by the great Alan Moore who, as far as I know, has never seen the movie version and has, like all the other movies based on his comics, had his name taken off the credits. He originally wanted to tell his story with the Charlton Comics characters that DC had, relatively recently at the time, bought but, when the company realised just how dark he was going to go with them, Moore was encouraged to create new heroes instead. 

And then Zack Snyder made a Watchmen movie in 2009 and, he did an amazing job with it. 

It wasn’t the first time it had been attempted, most famously by Terry Gilliam who, after a while, declared it unfilmable. I’d have to say that Snyder definitely proved the naysayers wrong. It’s an impressive movie and there are just a few changes, other than things which just build on ideas already present in the original 12 issue mini series. 

It’s basically a whodunnit, where the group of ‘once costumed heroes’ who are retired in this alternative version of history, due to current president Richard Nixon (still president in the 1980s in the story) making costumed vigilantes illegal (and idea which was also used in The Dark Knight Returns comic from the same year as Watchmen), have to solve a murder of one of their own. 

Two generations of costumed heroes are depicted with the main players being... Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley who lobbied for the role and was the only one who’d read the original comic mini series before being cast), Patrick Wilson as the second generation Nite Owl, Carla Gugino as the original Silk Spectre, Malin Akerman as the second generation Silk Spectre, Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian and Stephen McHattie as the original Nite Owl (who has published a book about the early days of the Minutemen - as the team of first generation heroes was called in the 1940s - called Under The Hood) and a whole host of others. Patrick Wilson is maybe not quite as dumpy as Nite Owl II is supposed to be but, he and all the others do an absolutely terrific job in a film which is absolutely densely packed with details. 

The opening credits montage, after the murder of The Comedian, is a wonderful snapshot of the 1940s through to the 1960s and fills the viewer in on some of the themes which will come up. Almost all the heroes are heavily flawed with, absolutely no doubt that the Comedian... who shot a woman carrying a baby in her womb, tried to rape Silk Spectre (and there’s a nice twist in that later in the story) and killed many innocents in both the Vietnam war (which America won in this version, because the US had Doctor Manhattan, walking in a giant sized version of himself and exploding people with his thoughts while Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries plays, in a direct reference to Apocalypse Now) and after, certainly deserving to die... but also the only one perceptive enough to see what is coming before it happens... and is killed for his trouble. Although, of course, Dr. Manhattan probably also knows because he doesn’t perceive time linearly like most people.

Like the comic, the film plays as a mystery in terms of who killed The Comedian and... is someone targetting ex-masked heroes or is something else even more world threatening going on? I won’t reveal who is behind everything but the film has a tragic ending in a way, with one of the heroes who gets obliterated by one of two of his allies having the last laugh in terms of a journal he kept and mailed to a newspaper... although if its taken seriously, it could also mean the end of the world!

It’s about corruption and people selling out and, ultimately, people deciding to do the wrong things for the right reasons. It’s very, very dark and is the second greatest superhero movie ever made (I still count Wonder Woman as the greatest). It’s one of the best things Zack Snyder ever did (certainly much better than his modern DC movies) and the Ultimate Cut, which I’d not seen before, brings it even closer to the comic book. While the Under The Hood text story back ups from each issue are not used, the Ultimate cut, which runs for around three and a half hours, puts in the comic book within a comic book, Tales From The Black Freighter, that the kid from the news stand keeps reading in the original source. I was worried these cartoon segments were going to look silly cut into the live action but the director does a really good job and they don’t stick out like a sore thumb unless the edit makes them do that when they’re supposed to. It’s all integrated very nicely. It also captures the tone of an old EC horror comic book from the 1950s really well, although the actual comic cover the kid is reading in the film marks it out as a DC comic. 

When the movie initially came out, I was angry that the original ending of a fake tentacle monster invading Earth to unite the nations in peace was replaced by an energy bomb which equally kills millions instead of invading aliens. But, reflecting on this, it might have seemed silly to an audience used to more sophisticated effects and plot mechanisms and I can see why they did it. But it’s a brilliant movie and many of the shots from the comic books (plus alternate pop culture incidents) are lovingly crafted in some of the most beautiful colour palettes and transitions rendered in film history...

The opening shot of the comic, which tracks up from The Comedian’s badge with the drop of his blood on the eye so we can see it laying in the blood from his splattered remains, where his body fell from being pushed from the window, doesn’t appear right at the start of the movie like the comic but it is recreated here later (the badge with the blood splash in the comic would be quickly acquired as a symbol of the Acid movement in 1980s and 90s music culture and I always found it amazing that none of the kids I met who wore the badge had any idea it was related to a comic book). 

Like the comic, the film shifts to cross-cutting between various sets of characters, as each issue was used to highlight a character in turn. So you get various characters dealt with in more detail at different points in the movie. My favourite sequence... which was also one of my favourites from the original comic... is where we see the man who became Dr. Manhattan obliterated in a nuclear accident and then gradually, over many months, rebuild himself out of nothing into the being he is now... all set to a couple of needle dropped pieces from the Philip Glass score to Koyaaniqatsi. It’s good stuff. 

It’s a film of wonder and horror and, I think, fully deserves the 18 rating the film got in the UK. It’s also one of the great works of art in cinematic history and I’m surprised people aren’t still talking about it. Like the comic it’s based on, though, it’s a very rich, dense text and probably a lot of stuff is missed in a casual viewing of the material. And that’s about as much as I want to say about Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut, I think. I could probably write a lot more, actually but it would end up like a thesis and I don’t want to go down that route, for sure. However, this will be rediscovered and hailed as the classic it is one day, I’m sure, but in the meantime... Who Watches The Watchmen? 

The Avengers

No Assembly Required

The Avengers
1961 -1969
161 episodes
From extremely mislabelled 
Studio Canal sets on DVD and Blu Ray

John Steed was not the original Avenger in The Avengers. Lots of people seem to forget that. There were also five Avengers girls and a couple of other regulars… people seem to forget that too.

I watched the early episodes in the early 1970s, between the ages of four to seven. They were on repeat in the afternoons and I watched them on our old black and white telly with my mum. I don’t recall seeing the Hendry episodes which is about right, they were put out live and only three and a third episodes of that first season have survived.

Anyway, since me and my mother had enjoyed our recent rewatch of The New Avengers so much I decided to invest in the various box sets (and single edition in the case of the episode Tunnel Of Fear, which was rediscovered years after the Series 1 and 2 box set was issued) so we could watch all the surviving episodes.

Of which, from the first season, 22 and two thirds are missing. We have everything else, though so, out of 161 episodes… we must have watched 138 episodes this time around. Not doing too badly, I guess. The series was kind of a sideways follow up to Police Surgeon, with some of the actors but none of the characters coming over to the new show.

Okay, so the first Avenger was Ian Hendry as Dr. David Keel. His fiance gets murdered in the first show, Hot Snow and, that’s all we have of that first episode. The stuff we are no longer able to see is the great Patrick Macnee turning up as John Steed. A shady man of mystery working for a shady organisation who offers Keel the chance to work for him to foil the criminals who killed his girlfriend. And, after this, to keep helping him out to eradicate criminals like them. A kind of, freelance Avenger, if you will.

I quizzed my late father when he was alive about this first season (two of which Macnee isn’t even in) and he said Steed was always an ambiguous character at this time. You were never really sure who he was working for and why… or even whether he was an actual good guy or someone very dark grey. And from the episodes with him in which have survived from this first season… well he certainly does play it like that.

But the whole thing is grim and hard hitting and not quite what the show would later become. For instance, you couldn’t imagine one of the ‘good guys’ holding up a loaded syringe and threatening to squirt one of the bad guys in the face with acid in the later shows but, that’s exactly what Dr. Keel does in one of those surviving episodes.

Hendry was pretty good in these episodes but I always liked him as an actor. Now Macnee is perceived as having a complete character change from the first series into the next seasons but, now I’ve seen how all those episodes play out, I disagree. He’s playing him the same way pretty consistently with not much of the perceived softening and just, maybe, becoming a little more sophisticated in steadying increments as the various seasons progress.

And there’s also Ingrid Hafner as regular Carol Wilson in the first series. Dr. Keel’s secretary and helper in his adventures. So technically the first Avenger girl. She does her bit as does Steed who, in the episode Tunnel Of Fear, seems just as quirky and eccentric as he does in the later episodes. Although the trademark bowler hat and umbrella aren’t a permanent, regular fixture until sometime in Series 3.

Steed and his new recruited, freelance and sometimes reluctant partners take over from Series 2. We have Dr. Martin King (played by Jon Rollason), the brilliant and very scatty nightclub singer Venus Smith (played by Julie Stevens) and, of course, Cathy Gale (as played by Honor Blackman). It was like they were doing live auditions, alternating between the co-star role week after week. Plus a few of Steed’s bosses occasionally turn up. And the stories do start getting a little quirkier and unique in places, depending on who was doing the writing.

Cathy Gale, of course, stuck... and she was the main - leather clad for the last reel hand to hand combat sequences - co-star for all of Series 3. 

The first season was shot live and the second/third seasons were shot on videotape… and it shows on all three seasons. People are constantly flubbing their lines because they were only doing one take, you get flies landing on the camera lens and you can sometimes see the crew… and in one wonderful moment you can see several of them wheeling a big old camera onto the next set through an open door. Wonderful stuff. Honor Blackman was lobbying for them to start shooting on film, which they did from series 4 onwards. Alas, by the time she got her wish she’d left the show to star in Goldfinger (reviewed by me here). There are a few references to that in the episodes themselves. In the last episode she’s going off on holiday to ‘pussyfoot’ around (a reference to her Bond character Pussy Galore) and, in the fourth series Christmas episode, Steed receives a Christmas card from Cathy Gale from Fort Knox.

Okay, so Diana Rigg turned up as her replacement for Series 4-6 (not 4-5 as Studio Canal will have you believe… I’ll get to that soon) and her character, Emma Peel (named after a shortening of the industry term Man Appeal to M Appeal), is certainly the one that casual watchers seem to remember. The Avengers was at the height of its popularity by this point.

She’s confident like Cathy Gale and she’s also, at least at first, still just a freelance with her own brilliant life going on at the same time but, by the time of her departure, something subtle and wordless has shifted the tone and, somewhere around  the time of opening sketches playing around the theme of “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed!”, which followed the title sequence, she somehow ended up as a full employee of… well, whoever Steed works for. Indeed, regular boss figure Mother, played beautifully by Patrick Newell, becomes the regular for the final, extended seventh season and his first episode is Emma Peel’s last one, which also introduces new Avengers girl Tara King, played wonderfully by Linda Thorson. At the end of the episode, after Mrs. Peel’s long thought dead husband turns up alive and well in an Amazon jungle, Steed tells Mother he needs a replacement and asks specifically for Tara King.

By this time, the show was getting more and more surreal and leaning more and more into the comedy… with deadly agents turning invisible using a kind of chameleon paste, fake time travel plots and even an episode as a remake of The Maltese Falcon (with Stratford Johns and Ronald Lacey filling in for Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre).

The casts throughout the various series were great with lots of returning actors like Peter Cushing (this and The New Avengers) and Christopher Lee and some actors that were reappearing as different people so regularly… people like Roy Kinnear, Philip Madoc, Peter Bowles, Julian Glover and Warren Mitchell… that they were almost drawing regular paychecks on the show.

There were some great title sequences too. The first three seasons had different, often alternating titles set to Johnny Dankworth’s original theme music for the show with Laurie Johnson coming in on the music for Seasons 4-7 (with some help from Howard Blake). It’s funny, even though Diana Rigg (who was certainly brilliant in the show) was not my favourite Avengers girl (I preferred Julie Stevens, Honor Blackman and Linda Thorson), I preferred the two title sequences she got over her three seasons, my favourite being her original black and white stills montage, which carried on the style (to some extent without the posterisation), of the previous sequences.

Oh, about that Laurie Johnson opening music from seasons 4-7... this would be the one that is most often remembered from the show but, the one you always find on commercial recordings (and to be fair, my favourite iteration), is the new arrangement of it he wrote for the final season with Tara King. There’s a lot more punchiness to it but my favourite section is a bit of counterpoint melody which plays on the second part of the main melodic line. Now it’s just a thing I always knew from the music but watching it now against the images, I finally realised that it’s a specific melody for Linda Thorson’s new character. Just after it starts on the titles we focus on Tara and, it’s also used as leitmotif for her character on occasion when she comes on screen in various stories. She even plays it herself on an organ in one episode. So, watching it now, that music totally makes sense to me and as each episode progresses, it pushes that connection. So I was surprised when... oh no, I’ll get to the 1998 movie in another review. 

And I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed most of the episodes I saw from the entire run of the show, including the one with the triffid creature from outer space. It’s all pretty good stuff and they even ran a spoof episode on my favourite TV show, The Prisoner, at one point.

And, with an aside to acknowledge stylish directors like Robert Feust (who would go on to direct the Dr. Phibes films and The Final Programme, reviewed here) I have to also acknowledge the slap dash way in which Studio Canal has decided to release these…

For starters, on the Blu Ray called Series 5, you have both Series 5 and the much shorter Series 6. With Season 7 turning up in the next set under the title Series 6! Worse than this, which is pretty bad already, they choose to present all the episodes in production order rather than their intended broadcast order. Which is totally different. So you’ll constantly be chopping and changing discs to find the real next episode throughout the entire run. Which is exactly the kind of rubbish presentation I would expect from Studio Canal but it doesn’t lessen the sting of the thing.

And that’s me pretty much done with The Avengers. A series I would totally recommend with the slight warning that, on most episodes, the visible camera boom will be your constant companion. And if you want to read up on the further exploits of John Steed and the brilliant follow up series, you can read my review of The New Avengers right here.

Endless Night

Fragment Rock

Endless Night
Directed by Sydney Gilliat
UK 1972
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Endless Spoilers.

I almost didn’t bother writing a review for this one because, although I found the film entertaining, I also found it rather slight in substance. A conclusion which was obviously similar to UK audiences at the time, where it didn’t receive a great reception. Apparently it fared considerably better in Italy on its release. 

Based on a book by Agatha Christie, Endless Night is the last of three films made co-starring Hywel Bennett and Hayley Mills, two of which, including this one (and the slightly better known Twisted Nerve) were scored by the late great Bernard Herrmann. And, as I say, it’s not got a lot going for it storywise... it tells the tale of Hywel Bennett’s young chauffer Michael who makes good by accidentally falling in love with and marrying the sixth richest young lady in the world, Ellie (played by Hailey Mills). An architect friend, Santomix, played by Per Oscarsson builds Michael’s dream home for them in Wales (with a location in the Isle Of Wight standing in for it) and things go alright for a while, apart from the inlaws and the former housekeeper who kind of moves in with them... Greta, played by Britt Ekland. Then things start to go wrong and Ellie is found dead under mysterious circumstances one day.

The whole thing is made slightly more interesting than it sounds by the use of a fragmentary structure and a slightly experimental playfulness with some of the editing and stock treatment. It’s told as a kind of fragmented flashback by Bennett’s character and various false starts and other narrative stammers are fought against and overcome to get his story out into the open. For instance, foreshadowing at the start of something revealed in more crucial detail from his childhood only at the end of the picture and an odd scene of repeat edits where he comes upon a faceless woman in a forest, rapidly repeated as a smooth camera movement three times, but treated slightly different on each stammer, with a different colour on each pass having, what looks like, a single colour missing from it... so green and red on one pass, blue and red on another and so forth. It’s quite striking but only lasts a few seconds. 

It’s filed with a whole host of wonderful supporting actors too... Peter Bowles, Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny herself), George Sanders (he killed himself a few months before the release of this film), Walter Gottell (who was in From Russia With Love and then as a regular reoccurring character in Roger Moore’s stint as James Bond) and even Windsor Davies. Plus, in a completely uncredited role, I spotted an auctioneer played by Nicholas Courteney (who was the long running character of the Brigadier in Doctor Who). 

Herrmann’s score is fine but it’s not what you’d be expecting for one of his thrillers, although it is appropriate to the movie. Although there are a few typical Herrmann moments of ‘fright’, using stabs of colour on a Moog synthesiser (Herrmann obviously thought the guy playing it did a good job because he let the musician share a credit on his card at the start of the movie... which I suspect he did because the producers wouldn’t give the musician his own credit and so offered space on his, like he did with the soloist on the film On Dangerous Ground... reviewed here), the score is much more in his lesser known romantic idiom, which aligns it much more closely to his scores for such films as The Ghost And Mrs. Muir than it does to any of his thriller scores. But it is good stuff, it has to be said.

The biggest problem with the film is that it telegraphs the killer from very early on. Hywel Bennett’s fragmented voice-over narrative really does point the finger very early on due as much to what is not said as much as what is initially seen. His general personality traits (and his relationship with his own mother) kind of flags his narrative as ‘not to be trusted’ and, I think without the framework that the director went with on this film, it would have been a far duller affair but with less chance of guessing the killer in the first five minutes, for sure. 

And that’s me done with Endless Night, I think... although I shall return to my CD of the score on occasion. Indicator do their usual nice job of including some extras, many of which on this Blu Ray focus on Bernard Herrmann... I haven’t explored those yet but I certainly intend to do so. 

Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace

The Purloined Necklace

Sherlock Holmes and 
the Deadly Necklace
aka Sherlock Holmes und 
das Halsband des Todes
West Germany/France/Italy 1962
Directed by Terence Fisher
Severin Blu Ray Zone 0
As part of Severin’s 
The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee 
Blu Ray Boxed Edition

Warning: Some slight spoilers.

Okay, I confess, the biggest selling point of Severin’s recent Blu Ray Boxed Edition, The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee Collection*, was to finally see the man playing the lead character in Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace. Three years after appearing opposite Peter Cushing’s Holmes as Sir Henry in The Hound Of The Baskervilles (reviewed here), Mr. Lee and the director of that movie, Terence Fisher, took themselves off to various locations in Ireland and Germany and shot what amounts to a black and white Krimi based on the Sherlock Holmes character, although it’s not actually based on any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s actual stories, it turns out. 

Now I’ve wondered over the years why this movie has such a bad reputation with people, especially given the talented director and a screenplay by Curt Siodmak, to boot. Well, while it’s possibly not for Sherlock Holmes purists (my dad was not impressed), I’d have to say that this was an enjoyable romp which I found most entertaining. 

Christopher Lee is impressive in this as an imposing but playful Holmes... perhaps not as stuffy as many interpretations but it’s a refreshing change, it has to be said. In Fisher and Lee’s earlier Holmes movie, Peter Cushing’s able assistant Dr. Watson was played by the great Andre Morel and that actor played him a little more truer to the original stories, I think. Here, though, we have another Hammer Horror stalwart, Thorley Walters, playing Watson and, while it’s not true to the character, he does play it fully channeling the old Nigel Bruce, bumbling friend version of the character from the Basil Rathbone films and, frankly, I’m very comfortable with that (Bruce is definitely my favourite Watson). In fact, Thorley Walters actually played Dr. Watson four times in his career, each time to a different actor playing Holmes in a production unrelated to any of his others. 

The film starts off with crisp black and white shots of London and the Thames before being cleverly substituted with footage filmed, I think, in Dublin (maybe not so cleverly inserted, in fact). We find Holmes in a disguise but the make up guys have not gone to so much trouble that you can’t tell it’s Christopher Lee and, frankly, it adds another level of the charming lack of credibility of Watson’s less than mercurial mind when he somehow can’t recognise his friend in this disguise. 

Pretty soon the characters find themselves embroiled in a murder investigation and a plot to steal a priceless necklace. They do battle with Moriarty (played by Hans Söhnker) and also encounter a very young Senta Berger, four years before she starred opposite George Segal in The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed here). I won’t say much about the plot but it’s very entertaining and also uses some moments of bizarre high comedy. For instance, early on in the film when Holmes is extolling the virtues of The Times newspaper, he demonstrates the respected newspaper’s effectiveness when rolled up and disarms Watson of a dagger with said item, which he asks his friend to attack him with. The knife flies up in the air and comes down onto Mrs. Hudson’s roast beef as she walks in with it. This scene also serves as a heads up later when he similarly saves his own life from a knife which is released from Moriarty’s walking stick... although, it has to be said, when the two of them meet I was just sitting there waiting for Holmes to start rolling up his newspaper for just such an occasion. 

There is also a fair amount of unintentional comedy too, not least because of the set up I chose to watch the film in. As many of the films in Germany at the time (and many in Italy for a long time, I believe), the film was shot silent and all the dialogue and foley was added after the fact, with the various actors speaking their own language. Since Lee and Walters were the primary characters, I decided to watch this in the English dub because I knew the lip synch would be closer when they were on the screen. However, it turns out that the two did not dub themselves and a couple of American sounding actors stood in for their voice performances, by all accounts. Lee’s dubbing is okay and Walters isn’t too distracting but, what is distracting, is whenever they talk about Moriarty they pronounce it MoriarAty! This just sounds completely off and is quite funny. 

One last thing... I’m not too familiar with Terence Fisher’s style as yet (although I should be, I’ve seen enough of his movies over the course of my life) but I was really liking the way he was framing the film here. He tends to be totally obsessed in this, it seems to me, with the centre of the widescreen frame. Most of the time the main characters are to be found around the centre of the frame or, if not, they soon gravitate to that area. Indeed, in a shot transition which is almost jarring in that it goes from a centre aligned shot to the next scene where Holmes and Watson are at the right and left extremes of the frame with dead space between them, he manages to go from this to a centre aligned design again. He does this by having Christopher Lee walk to the left slightly while panning around with the camera on the seated Watson on the right until both the characters are placed centrally once more. Nice stuff. 

Other than that, well, the music isn’t that great. It’s credited to Martin Slavin but I’m wondering if it was just library music cued in, perhaps written by him to apply for various scenarios in a number of films? It doesn’t really add to the thing, to be honest. Asides from that though, I have to admit that, contrary to most people’s experiences with the film, I did find Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace to be an extremely entertaining piece and I will certainly catch up to it again one day. I did have a good time with this one and it was worth getting the box for, I reckon. 

*At time of writing this review... two more volumes of The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee have also been released in the time it’s taken me to get this one up on the blog. My apologies. But all the films in them will eventually be reviewed here (if I live that long). 

Italian Gothic Horror Films 1957-1989

Faux Goth And Multiply

Italian Gothic Horror Films
1957-1969
by Roberto Curti with a forward by Ernesto Gastaldi
McFarland Press ISBN 9780786494378

Italian Gothic Horror Films
1970-1979
by Roberto Curti 
McFarland Press ISBN 9781476664699

Italian Gothic Horror Films
1980 - 1989
by Roberto Curti 
McFarland Press ISBN 9781476672434

Just a very short but sweet shout out to an absolute powerhouse of a trilogy of reference books by Roberto Curti, comprising Italian Gothic Horror Films 1957 -1969, 1970-1979 and 1980-1989. Not that there aren’t still a few Italian Gothic Horror movies made to this day (and still just about being made, I’m very glad to say) but because, as you’ll see from the progression of the tomes themselves, it goes very much into decline by some point in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

So, each volume is set out in years and every Italian gothic (in Curti’s view) is included with a full listing of titles, alternative titles, casts, crew, distributors etc… just like Sight And Sound used to do, back in the days when that was a great magazine and not the pale spectre of a cinematic review it is these days.

Following on from each entry is a fairly large summation of the film itself, before Curti gets into the full meat and bones of each production, giving potted biographies of the key players, analysis of the way each film came to be funded and made… as well as any distribution and certification woes which eventually led to each film’s buoyancy or downfall at both the Italian and International box offices. And, clearly, Curti has been quite thorough in his research.

Of course, all the classics you would expect from tomes entitled in this manner are covered such as I Vampiri, Black Sunday, Black Sabbath, The Ghost, Suspiria, Inferno, The Beyond and so forth, all including valuable information about each film’s genesis that even the less than casual viewer may find noteworthy. It also delves into the possibly slightly shadowy area of the photonovel style magazines which accompanied some of the films in Italy when they were released... and even, in at least one case, when the film remained either unreleased or heavily censored, neither fate of which befell the photo magazine version.

If I had anything critical to say, asides from the author continually referring back to the Italian titles of many films and thus leaving me in the dark as to which film he’s talking about (and don’t get me started on the fact that a fair few of the English titles of the films have been released in alternate titles by various boutique labels since these works were first published), it would be his insistence of including certain non-horror films in the collection, when actually they belong to another genre entirely…

And I’m primarily talking about gialli here. I mean, there aren’t that many included and I totally understand the inclusion of films like All The Colours Of The Dark. I mean, that film is revealed in the final scooby-doo like reveal to be a giallo for sure but, in Curti’s defence, it does use the language and trappings of the gothic horror film and poses as such for the majority of its running time.

I’m much less forgiving about the inclusion of such thrilling gems as The Red Queen Kills Seven Times or A White Dress For Marialé. On the other hand, certain films that have been marketed as gialli in recent years, by nefarious labels trying to lure unwary customers into parting with their money by tying them into the currently popularity of that genre, are clearly and quite rightly defined as gothic horror here… so I’m glad someone else is with me when it comes to such brilliant genre films as The Perfume Of The Lady In Black or even the somewhat dreary Seven Deaths In The Cat’s Eye.

My biggest pleasure when I read these kinds of reference books is the number of titles new to me which I can add to my shopping list… and I certainly have only seen about a half to two thirds of the movies listed within these pages. That being said, when I started researching titles I was less than familiar with, I discovered that I already had around 90% of them to watch on Blu Ray, sitting in various piles around the room, often as part of boxed editions put out by the likes of Severin Films and Vinegar Syndrome… so that was a nice surprise!

Well that about wraps it up for me and Roberto Curti’s three volume set Italian Gothic Horror Films. These are probably the most useful books I’ve read on the general view of the genre and I would have to recommend them as essential cineaste reference books, as far as I’m concerned. Not a lot more to say about it other than there’s a lot of ground covered in these. Definitely worth a purchase.

Hold That Ghost

Moose On First

Hold That Ghost
Directed by Arthur Lubin
USA 1941
Universal Pictures
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Well this one is going to be one of the shorter reviews in this series (I hope) because, while I’m sure I probably loved it as a kid, I really didn’t think much of the Abbott and Costello vehicle Hold That Ghost this time around, it has to be said.

The plot is an old one... by accidentally being in close proximity to gangster Moose when he is shot by police, Chuck (Bud Abbott) and Ferdi (Lou Costello) inherit all his wealth, which amounts to an old, spooky mansion in the middle of nowhere... being as Moose always told people he kept the location of his fortune ‘in his head’. However, his old gangster friends want the fortune for themselves (if they can find it) and so, for reasons involving various machinations, the boys find themselves stranded with three other main protagonists... played by Richard Carlson (who you may remember from such Universal monster movies as Creature From The Black Lagoon... reviewed here... and It Came From Outer Space), Evelyn Ankers (who you may remember from such Universal monster movies as The Wolf Man... reviewed here... and Ghost of Frankenstein, reviewed here) and Joan Davis (who wasn’t in any Universal monster movies but who turns out to be a pretty good, physical comedy actress)... in their spooky new mansion. Here, the bunch of crooks try to frighten them off or kill them as the night goes on (and after they accidentally stumble across the money). 

That’s the set up and... it’s not without it’s charms I guess but I can’t say I found it all that funny. Maybe one of the reasons was that there was more slapstick and less of the clever dialogue (although there was certainly some in there). The film was mostly shot before their prior film but, after the huge success of Buck Privates (reviewed here), the studio decided they needed to follow it with another ‘service picture’ and so In The Navy (reviewed here) was shot and released before reshoots on this one. The reshoots added an opening scene at a nightclub, to shoehorn the wonderful Andrews Sisters into the movie (singing a surprisingly dire song, I would say) and an ending scene where the boys have opened their own nightclub, also featuring the Andrews Sisters (with a slightly better song). 

As I said it’s not their best but it’s the first time their ‘moving candle’ routine was incorporated into one of their movies (and not for the last time, if memory serves) and a really wonderfully constructed ‘dance goes wrong’ scene Costello and Davis do as a duo which, is impressive if not necessarily all that funny. 

Other things I may point out is the inclusion, briefly, of The Three Stooges front man Shemp Howard, once again, as a guy behind the counter in a diner (why is he always playing a food service related character in these early Bud and Lou pictures?) and also a scene where Lou goes flying and plants his head through a brick wall which, honestly, reminded me of the scene in Blade Runner (reviewed here) where Rutger Hauer’s character deliberately plants his head through a wall. Oh, well... one head through a wall scene looks the same as any other, I guess. 

The only other notable thing I can think to say is that a few of the music cues will be recognisable to fans of the Universal horror movies from around that time (such as the ones I mentioned above starring Evelyn Ankers) as being tracked in from stuff by, presumably, composers Hans J. Salter and Frank Skinner. 

And that’s me done with Hold That Ghost. I’m definitely more of a fan of the two headliners’ clever word play more than the knockabout stuff featured in this one, it has to be said. Still, there’s over 20 more of these to watch in Shout Factory’s restored boxed edition so, yeah, I’ll let you know.

Labyrinth

A Load Of Trap

Labyrinth
Directed by Ryühei Kitamura
USA 2025
Screened on 29th August at FrightFest

Warning: This one has spoilers.

Okay then... so Labyrinth was my fourth and final pick from this year’s FrightFest and I chose this one because I figured it would be a gory and violent film and, it’s been a long time since I saw one of those dumb, mindless, bloodletting movies. I thought it would make a nice change from the ghost stories and high concept films I’d been watching during the rest of the festival. 

Alas, Labyrinth just reminded me of why I tend not to gravitate to these kinds of films in the first place. It kinda uses the same style of plot as the Saw films (of which I only saw the first when it came out in the cinema... although I am assawed these are actually worth a look for my blog sometime) and just gives it a slightly different method behind the madness, so to speak.

So, we have a bunch of people who we all see abducted by... I’ll call them ‘angels of death’... in an extended sequence leading up to the title card. The abducted are played by Mekhi Phifer, Alexxis Lemire, Shane West, Chris Klein, Ami Park and David Sakurai. I think that’s all of them. Anyway, they are brought to a series of rooms and corridors by a character who is, presumably, supposed to be Satan, played by Tommy Flanagan... who seems to be attempting to channel Christopher Lee a tad. And they all have to survive a series of death traps to atone for their sins.

And I’m sorry to say... it all leads up to an ending which the audience will most likely see coming. I won’t give it away here but most people will get there long before the last sequence of the movie.

Now... it’s well acted and, it is hyper gory in terms of bloody carnage... although I was hoping/expecting the goriness to be a little more innovative or pushed beyond the norm for a movie which, more or less, exists just for these kinds of bloody set pieces. It can get quite intense in places too... such as the Russian Roulette scene. And the actors are all pretty good although, honestly, if you want the audience on your side you should probably not have killed off the most charismatic personality in the cast first. 

As the film plays out, it becomes clear that the various characters have all done something bad in their past and it’s the reason why they have ended up in a labyrinth of traps. But, again, you are kind of expecting that too.

I mean, it’s a well shot production but, honestly, as I’m writing these words and realising this is going to be a really short review, I can’t think of too much more to say about the film, either good or bad. There was a lot of laughter coming at me from the right hand side of the auditorium whenever one of the specific actors opened his mouth and said something but, I can only assume that’s because some of the crew or maybe his mates were all sitting in the audience too. It’s not as though he was saying anything funny. And some people were definitely getting freaked out a little (a girl sitting next to me was having a hard time with some of the scenes) with some of the gore... although, apart from a scene where the actor I mentioned above has to cut out his vocal cords with some scissors, there’s nothing new on show here... the usual decapitations, head to toe body splittings, crucifixions etc. If you’ve seen one horror trap movie you’ve seen them all is what I was thinking about these kinds of movies as I watched... but then I remembered the brilliance of such movies as the original Cube and then think, no, it can be done well.

Sadly, for my money at least, Labyrinth is not a movie that does this particularly well. It certainly does it competently and it looks very professional... there’s just not anything innovative in terms of the story content for me and, yeah, you really will see that ending coming from a mile off. Not one I’ll visit again, for sure.

Another

Home From Home

Another
Directed by Andy Chen
USA 2026
28th August Screening at FrightFest

Okay, so my third pick from FrightFest this year was Another… and I picked this because the summary hinted that it would be a physics based journey into parallel worlds. I’ll say up front this will be a short review and I’ll also say it’s technically accomplished for a small budget piece. You usually see a fair few bad, amateurish looking films popping up at these festivals, it’s par for the course but, this year all the films I saw looked professionally put together.

All that being said, I found myself a little disappointed with this one. Yes, it does, as I’d guessed, deal with accessing parallel worlds but… and I can’t really blame the writer for this… the science of the thing is as ignored as it would be in any 50s B-movie, with a scenery chewing professor and a bunch of Ken Strickfadden gadgets back then. Which is what the film essentially is, I guess.

Now, I was really enjoying this for the first 20 minutes or so, with strong performances from India de Beaufort as a best selling writer struggling to land her second novel after losing her husband in a brutal car accident... and also from Bob Morley as said husband. These actors have you believing in the characters as people right from the get go and their efforts in this set up a nice, sturdy playing field to lay out the rest of the movie.

Unfortunately, for this audience member at least (and it may be because at this point I’m older and very jaded to this kind of thing), the film failed to bring much of anything new to the narrative and so I found myself constantly second guessing the story and, it turns out, getting it right each time. Even to the point where I could pretty much predict roughly what the last shot of the movie would be.

It doesn’t really help matters that the film does seem to be telegraphing itself so that, every time a new ‘revelation’ is made, you already figured it out ten minutes prior to that.

Now, there was one sequence I liked which did take me by surprise, featuring a creature in a door in a tree but the sting was soon taken out of this because a) that sequence turns out to be a dream in the mind of de Beaufort’s character and b) it needlessly made very blatant the obvious metaphor at the heart of the narrative, where the writer character’s fictional works are a parallel for the ‘bad science experiment’ which drives the story. So it did feel a little like the film makers were trying to beat you over the head with it by this point.

And, another short review I’m afraid but that’s me just about done with Another. The director listed Christopher Nolan as being an influence on his work during the inevitable Q & A session at the end of the screening and, I couldn’t help but think, yeah, The Prestige was a similarly obvious movie which fell into exactly the same kind of traps this one did. So, yeah, that’s that with me and this film, I think.

Salmokji - Whispering Water

Water Way To Go

Salmokji - Whispering Water
Directed by Lee Sang Min
south Korea 2026
28th August 2026 Screening at FrightFest

Okay, so after the somewhat brilliant movie Nervous (reviewed here) I returned to FrightFest the next morning for my second of this year’s films, Salmokji - Whispering Water. Which looked pretty fantastic and grossed about a gazillion pounds in its home country, knocking Project Hail Mary (still haven’t seen that) off of the top spot.

Now then, it would be true to say that this movie was mostly what I expected it to be but, sadly, not nearly as much as I’d hoped it would be.

The film starts with the brilliant premise that a road route to and in a remote forest area away from the city has had the images replaced with a ghost head staring out of the big lake. The company responsible for shooting the films and stills delete the offending image but are hit with an ultimatum by their client that new footage needs to be up by the end of the day (which, makes no sense to me because... why would you not have a back up anyway) so a new team has to go and film it.

The last team are missing and with the former director on sick leave after his experience there but, they all go down to the place and, one of the innovations of the film, if you want to call it that, is the sped up journey of the van spherised and shrunk down to a moving globe of passing footage at the centre of the screen (look, that’s the best way I can think of describing the effect… go see it if you want to see what I’m talking about).

Of course, when the crew and their producer Su In, played by Lim Hye-yoon, get there, things of an uncanny and definitely spooky nature, all focused around the lake, start to happen. And then the producer who is ill turns up and, if that doesn’t strike up a warning alarm in your brain, then you probably will quite enjoy this one. Of course, before you can say Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water (and if you get that reference you’re probably pretty old), all watery hell breaks loose and, as many a young lady could tell you, there’s nothing light hearted about your waters breaking.

Okay, so someone whose opinion I admire greatly was exiting the screening as I left and so I asked him what he thought. His response was that it’s clichéd and, yeah, I think he really hit the nail on the head for this one (thanks Jason).

And that’s a big problem for this film, which has quite a good opening premise but then starts to very quickly pile on the expected tropes for this kind of movie. And then repeats them… and then overplays them for the rest of the movie. The problem is, for instance, that once you realise the lake can masquerade as anything plus any safe space in or out of the area… there’s not much point in rooting for any of the characters. Everyone is doomed and, I’ll charitably allow the filmmakers (who have made a pile of money out of this thing, don’t forget), that this is the main reason why the film just isn’t very scary and none of the jump scares really work either.

Honestly, Salmokji - Whispering Water plays like a very tedious, young-teen minded film and so, yeah, this reviewer is many decades removed from the target audience but, I do find it infuriating that a film which is as well lensed as this one kind of shoots itself in the foot by doing exactly what is expected of it, rather than deviating and taking a more interesting route. This one just wasn’t my cup of tea, it’s sad to say.  

Nervous

Recorded Delivery

Nervous
Directed by Abner Pastoll
2026 South Korea/United Kingdom
27th August 2026 Screening at Frightfest

It’s that time of year once again and, as always, one of the films I decided to attend at this year’s edition of FrightFest was the opening film, Nervous.

Now I’d like to say I chose this screening because the film looked really interesting (and, indeed, it did and is) but my primary motivation on this thing was, as always, to be one of the first to check out the FabPress stall for new books and US Blu Rays from the likes of Severin Films, so yeah, mission accomplished on that count.

That being said, I’m so pleased this was the opening film of the festival this year because, it was a truly great movie. After a bit of a false start that is, since the first ten minutes played without subtitles on the Korean parts of the dialogue and then, when they finally realised, they started the film off again with the proper subtitle track.

So, an Irish girl called Sarah, played by Sarah Bolger, goes to Korea with her husband Sungsoo, played by Sungsoo Yune (hmm… I sensing a trend with the character names here). They pitch up at the isolated dream house that Sungsoo’s Aunt has effectively given them but when they get there they find a mysterious intruder who leaves quickly. Also, another lady kinda joins them in friendship called Eunbyeol, who is played by none other than Ko Asung, from The Host and Snowpiercer (reviewed by me here).

But the young couple also find an old gramophone in the attic, which plays a record emitting, seemingly, silence plus weird crackling. Could it all have something to do with the outbreak of dead men and missing women which seems to have been sweeping the area?

Not long after this, Sarah stops being able to hear her husband, who just starts coming out feint and muffled on the audio track of the film. And as Sarah gets more involved with the somewhat mysterious and seductive Eunbyeol, she (and the audience) realises that it’s all men that she can’t hear, while she can hear the women-folk just fine. What’s that I hear you cry? “Not all men!” Well yeah, I think that’s kind of the point… the film does have a not so subtle, ‘me too’ feminist agenda but… it takes its chances with all the other story beats and, in this particular milieu, I didn’t think it was out of place and it's a valid point to make.

And that’s as much as I want to tell you about the plot, suffice it to say that the rogue comments about serial killers and missing women does, indeed, come into play by the end of the tale.

It’s a pretty beautiful film to start the festival off with, to be sure. Absolutely stunning cinematography and frame designs. The director likes to use big rectangular blocks of tonally variant surfaces, textures and colours to both either use as a separator for a couple of characters in a shot or, in one spectacular moment in particular, to bring his characters together in a centred, dark panel of the frame while the two outside quarters of the screen are light and used to highlight that integration of people.

And, needless to say, the film also has some excellent sound design, which, for a film that trades in crackles and muffles, it really does need to have, to be fair.

Not to mention a sequence towards the end which will have you holding on to your right ear in sympathy with what one of the characters does to themselves. It’s a slow burn but that approach more than enhances a couple of scenes which, shall we say, are not for the squeamish.

And that’s me done with this years opening FrightFest film Nervous. An absolutely beautiful film which, okay, maybe needs a more compelling title but is absolutely exquisite and, I just hope it manages to secure both a theatrical and Blu Ray release in this country, at some point soon. Maybe a label like Mubi should take a look at this one.

This Island Earth

Last Exeter 
To Metaluna

This Island Earth
Directed by Joseph M. Newman
USA 1955
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Very minor spoilers.

It’s nice revisiting old movies you haven’t seen for a while and especially interesting when, as in the case of this absolute science fiction classic, This Island Earth, you have somehow wiped out most of the movie (apart from the last ten minutes), from your memory. So much here is not as I remember it but, of course, it has some iconic moments in it, largely due to the make up worn by Jeff Morrow as Metalunan scientist Exeter and also, naturally, one of the most recognised screen monsters of all time, the single (I remember a whole army of them from when I was a kid, the mind plays strange tricks), solitary Metalunan mutant. Even if people don’t, for whatever reason, remember the picture, everyone surely recognises the monster. It’s also guest starred in a cameo or two over the years and I’ve even seen it being used to sell whisky back in the 1980s, if memory serves. 

The plot is very simple... a scientist, Dr. Cal Meacham (played by Universal regular Rex Reason), after being rescued from a failed test flight by an unseen alien force, finds some ‘electrical components’  have been sent to his laboratory. Components he’s never seen which, eventually, lead him to construct an otherwordly technical gadget called an interocitor. Then, an alien called Exeter (played by Morrow), tells him he has passed his intelligence test and recruits him to join his scientific commune, some hundreds of miles away. He does so and he, and two other scientists, including his eventual love interest Dr. Ruth Adams (played by Faith Domergue), suspect there is a less benign agenda to their goal of manufacturing unlimited reserves of atomic power. 

Without going into much more of the plot, this leads Cal and Ruth to being the only two surviving scientists left, who are whisked away to the planet of Metaluna in a fruitless attempt to save Exeter’s race from being exterminated in an interplanetary war. It’s not long, however, before Exeter is the last survivor of his race, desperately trying to get Cal and Ruth back to Earth while keeping out of the pincer like claws of the Metalunan mutant that has stowed away on their space craft. 

So, yeah, it sounds fascinating and it is... it’s also a little dull in places too, it has to be said. The chemistry between some of the actors doesn’t seem all that great, truth be told but, what it lacks in emotional drama it certainly makes up for in all the other technical departments. It’s quite spectacular to look at, not only for it’s sophisticated special effects (for the time) but also in some nice clean, simply constructed shot designs, good editing and sound and, of course, the hotch potch soundtrack, half composed as an original score by Herman Stein and half recycled Universal sci-fi horror scores by the likes of Hans J. Salter and Henry Mancini (there’s an absolutely beautiful, authentic, modern re-recording of the score on David Schecter’s label Monstrous Movie Music which is well worth having. Schecter is also included on a commentary track and making of documentary on this wonderful Blu Ray transfer). 

I’ve not read Raymond F. Jones original omnibus novel version of his three serialised stories which make up the story This Island Earth (yet, it’s now on my radar) but the classic Metalunan mutant, who chases Faith Domergue around the flying saucer while she’s waiting for the men folk to be released from their decompression tubes, in a sequence which was absolutely the epitome of suspense to me as a kid in the 1970s (nowadays, perhaps less so) was actually designed, as is my understanding, not by the credited Bud Westmore (I don’t trust that name when I see it on credits at all) but by the lady he got fired for being a much better designer than him years earlier, Millicent Patrick. I think she pretty much designed a prototype of this (if memory serves and, see the fantastic book The Lady From The Black Lagoon, reviewed by me here) before she started working on her similarly iconic design of the Creature From The Black Lagoon (reviewed here). Either way it’s a classic monster and always fun to see around. 

There are some other interesting things to note... 

The enemy ships are also unusual in that the way they try and destroy the Metalunan saucers and, indeed, the planet itself, is by picking up and then hurling asteroids, more or less. And the mechanism used for the beautiful glass version of the Universal picture logo at the time became the mechanism for the spinning, atomic symboled Metalunan control machine on the saucer. And, of course, the interocitor can destroy things by triangulating three laser beams... surely an influence on George Lucas’ vision of the laser cannon on the Death Star in his Star Wars films.

All in all, This Island Earth is... in some ways a bit clunky and, I honestly can’t see it going down well with kids today. People who are slightly older, however, should enjoy this relatively fun romp and the Blu Ray version has an absolutely beautiful transfer of a mostly untroubled print. Definitely worth some of your time if you are a lover of 1950s sci-fi movies and the Blu Ray even includes a reminiscence about the film by Italian writer/director Luigi Cozzi (who directed such movies as Star Crash and Contamination). Definitely worth picking up on Blu Ray if you get the chance. 

Radius

Radius Of The Lost Arc

Radius
Canada 2017
Directed by 
Caroline Labrèche & Steeve Léonard
Epic Pictures

Warning: A radial pattern of full spoilerage coming your way as you start reading this one.

Okay... I discovered Radius by accident, thought the basic premise looked halfway decent and decided to give it a punt. What a shame then that, after the first two thirds of this movie proved intriguing and suspenseful, the writer/director team kind of drop the ball and do what a lot of modern Doctor Who episodes have been doing for the last ten years or so, namely explain the central concept away with a throwaway, blink and you’ll miss it, pseudo-scientific piece of claptrap and then concentrate on what turns out to be the much less surprising aspect of the movie... and pretend that is the twist reveal instead. 

However, it does start off in a wonderfully high concept, apocalyptic way and so let me just talk you through the double set up because, even though the last 20 or so minutes is pretty dire, you will still have a fun time getting there, I think. 

So the film starts off after a car accident on a rainy night. We meet the person who seems to be the sole survivor, Liam, played by Diego Klattenhoff. Well I say his name is Liam but we don’t know that yet... and neither does he. As it soon turns out he’s completely lost his memory. Then, when he tries to flag down a car, it almost runs him over as it runs itself off the road, the driver dead with her eyes misted over. Then a bird drops dead from the sky. What’s going on? Liam finds a lone diner and goes inside... but all the customers are dead. Is this a gas attack? He finds his drivers licence and manages to find out where he lives. He drives there and as he is trying to figure out just who he is, a person approaches him and promptly drops dead. After a while, he realises that there is no gas or viral attack... every time someone gets within about 20 yards of him, they just drop dead. 

Then, as he holes up in his shed, since the police are looking for him in relation to these unexplained deaths, a girl comes knocking at his house. He tells her not to come close but, before he knows it she is knocking on the shed door... except she shouldn’t have been able to get that far. The woman is called, well, he calls her Jane (played by Charlotte Sullivan) but, she doesn’t know what her actual name is but, police identified the car she was in as his car. She too survived the same crash but has absolutely no memory of who she is or why she is there. And then, when they try to stealthily find out what’s going on, it becomes clear that Liam doesn’t kill people within a certain radius of his body anymore... unless the girl steps outside that radius. Then people will fall down dead around him. So the two try to find little memory jogs from their life before to try and figure out what’s going on, both of them now under suspicion by the police and subject to a nationwide manhunt.

And that’s the thing and, I really wish that was the only premise that the writers were going to be pursuing here because that really is enough. Alas, they then try and add another twist and, it’s the one twist that I would imagine most audiences are going to guess... especially once we approach the end of the film and it’s quite obvious that ‘some weird space lightning caused them to become this way’ is the only explanation we’re going to get for what has happened to them, to make them two halves of an inadvertent killing machine. So yeah, by that point, the revelation has to therefore be something unrevealed about the identity of the two people and, yeah, it won’t take the audience more than a few moments to realise that one of them is a serial killer and they were not necessarily friends after all, before the space lightning caused their amnesia and made them the way they are. 

And yeah, what a let down eh? Also, by that point, despite not having any real vague explanation as to the science behind their condition, you realise there’s only one way this can now end and, yeah, you’ll probably be right on the money with that one too, I would think.

It’s shot nicely, it’s competent and there are some nice set pieces to it for sure. Such as when they are at the hospital and Liam gets shut in a crowded elevator without Jane, and she has to run down the stairs to try and keep up with the elevator so that everyone in there apart from Liam doesn’t drop dead. And the directors aren’t afraid to not fill half the shot with movement, sometimes nicely pitching a close up of a face to one side of the screen with nothing much going on in the rest of the shot. And it’s nicely acted and the effect of people and animals suddenly dropping dead with their eyes misting over in grey is pretty chilling too.

So, all being said and done, I quite enjoyed a lot of the elements of Radius but, I can’t really quite recommend it because the main conceptual hook... and it’s a really great one... is just not given any real play once the writers decide to move on from it and I felt that this was the core of the movie and not necessarily the personality reveals on the two central protagonists. So yeah, a nice piece of high concept science fiction but with the guts taken out of it by a lack of any real explanation to that premise by the end of the picture. Sometimes it’s not enough to just resolve the problems of the central characters... the audience needs to really understand these problems too.

Throne Of Blood

Arrowing Experience

Throne Of Blood
aka Kumonosu-jô
aka Cobweb Castle
aka Macbeth
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Japan 1957 
Toho 
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Finally revisiting an old favourite by the greatest ever director... Akira Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood, one of his many masterpieces, which is somewhat surprising since it comes from a source writer who I do not rate at all highly. That writer being one William Shakespeare, as this movie is an adaptation of his infamous ‘Scottish play’, known to audiences as Macbeth... transposed by Kurosawa and his company to the days of ancient samurai. 

The film starts off announcing its arrival on the credits with an attack of jagged percussion instrumentation while an unsettling, almost atonal melody plays against it as part of the great Masaru Satô’s incredible score (one of many he provided for Kurosawa and other directors). 

So this is the story of Macbeth which, as it happens, I’ve only ever known through this adaptation of it so, honestly, I can’t tell you much about how it shapes up compared to the ‘dread bard’s’ words... other than the three witches have been transposed to a singular character who, always sounds male to me but the subtitles assure me it’s a lady. S/he shapeshifts into other versions of the same apparition throughout the course of the film.

Okay, so this is jam packed with great actors such as my two favourites, Toshiro Mifune as the main man and the exceptional Takashi Shimura in a much more minor role this time around, it has to be said. Added to this are excellent performances by the likes of Isuzu Yamada as this film’s equivalent of Lady Macbeth and Minoru Chiaki as Mifune’s once best friend, before the combined treachery of the prophesised vision and the scheming machinations of the lady come to fruition and turn Mifune against that friend.

And, true to form, the director decided a mock castle would not do so, he had the US Marines stationed in the area help him build portions of a real one to shoot on. Everyone uses this and other locations (including studio bound sets - Cob Web forest being a combination of a real forest and interior sets) to great advantage. Of course, Kurosawa’s trademark shot design and editing combine to make some very sophisticated shots, sometimes including more elabourate camera movements than you might notice, happening without attracting any attention to themselves, blending into the overall edit in an almost throwaway manner.

For instance, early on in the film when the two friends, returning from battle, find the witch in the forest, there’s a brilliant shot (which I had to rewind this time to take in what I’d just thought I’d seen) where the two samurai dismount facing the camera, come towards it and then past it with the camera following from behind, looking over their shoulders at what they are seeing, before going even further, past them and taking their point of view completely. Pretty sophisticated stuff which, like I said, feels just like a throwaway shot when, actually, it’s imparting so much visual information. 

Not to mention some fantastic stuff done with the sound design, such as the sound of the wife’s kimono as she walks in one sequence, being repeated as a forewarning of her presence in the next scene. 

A couple of points of interest about the film. 

One is, the story goes, they had to get Mifune good and drunk for his final scene where hundreds of arrows are shot at him... and also in him... in a sustained sequence. No special effects for that kind of thing in those days, of course. Just blocks of wood under the armour and a reliance on hitting your marks and hoping the company sharp shooters wouldn’t hit you in the face. I still have no idea how the effect with the arrow going through his neck was achieved (nor do I really want to... it’s ‘movie magic’ innit?).

The other thing is... this was the inaugural film played at the opening of the National Film Theatre. Which leads me to my one big criticism of this presentation of it. Apart from the shape certain sections of the print seem to be in (surely you should have been able to get rid of some of those lines digitally?), the BFI have not sought fit to provide subtitles for the male chorus narrating the story at the beginning and end of the film. A terrible oversight if you ask me. 

Still, Throne Of Blood is yet another Kurosawa masterpiece and something that’s not to be missed, although a US version by someone like Criterion may well be a better way to go with it, it has to be said. 

La Llorona (1933)

 

To Weep,
Perchance To Die

La Llorona
Directed by Ramón Peón
Mexico 1933
Indicator UK Blu Ray

Before this movie, the only film I’d consciously seen which was overtly based on the Mexican folk horror tales of La Llorona - aka The Weeping Woman - aka The Crying Woman or any other variant translations - was the 2019 American made movie set in The Conjuring universe (The Curse Of La Lorona, reviewed by me here). However, I soon became aware that there is a rich cinematic legacy of films made from or inspired by these stories and so I figured I’d lift the lid at some point. And that begins now with this recent (at time of writing, although I left it too late to get the slipcase edition... a shame as I’d actually have liked to read the printed booklet on this one) release from Indicator of what is widely known as the very first horror talkie made in Mexico (as opposed to other latino versions made in America of early talkies such as the much loved Spanish language version of Dracula... reviewed by me as part of a this article here).

Now, I have to say that it barely scrapes by as a horror movie in my book, due to the flashback interpretive nature of large portions of it, which render the central myth as something not to be taken without a pinch of salt... but the very last few shots of the movie do, I would say, tip it into the realm of a good old supernatural horror story so, yeah, first Mexican horror talkie it is. 

It’s also, in equal parts, fairly charming and quite sinister in tone, I would say. Seeing it now for the first time, I was surprised how much the visual and audio syntax of early American cinema had already transcended the USA and into other film cultures but, this is perhaps not so surprising since a) the director had some early training in Hollywood and b) a lot of Mexican film technicians and actors had returned from working on Hollywood movies and brought a lot of technical know how back to Mexico with them. Mexican cinema was booming with 21 films apparently made in 1933, as opposed to just over a handful the previous year. 

The film is set in three time periods... contemporary times to when it was shot, plus sometime during the colonial period and then another time during the era when the conquistadors rolled up on the Aztec empire. The two older time periods take place in extended flashback sequences when two different books tell what seem to be two different variants of the La Llorona story and, almost like the writers wanted to have their cake and eat it, both of these have been shoehorned into the story in a way that... I have to admit... I couldn’t quite understand and was left a little confused by, in terms of the curse that befalls the central family in the modern setting of the film. Neither of these versions of the story, though, features the drowning of the children at their heart and, instead, children are knifed to death in the chest. 

The film starts strongly with a man walking the streets of Mexico in the night and, upon hearing the wailing of the weeping woman, he dies of a heart attack. We then meet the family of one of the doctors who performs his autopsy and then his son has his four years old birthday party. Alas, he then finds out the first born of each generation of his family have gone missing on their fourth birthday, only to turn up days later dead... with a dagger in the chest. Meanwhile, as the grandfather of the family tells the first story leading to the flashback, a sinister figure in black robes reminiscent of an ebony variant of a Klu Klux Klan costume is watching and spying on the family... later going for the son, twice, in order to carry on acting out the curse of La Llorona. 

And it’s great. Right from the outset, as the credits were rolling, I was charmed by the fact that I was watching a movie from a time and culture that, before the actors were even mentioned, an important credit was “The furniture in this film was specially made by...”. I mean, get your product placement in first, I guess.

It’s also not an unsophisticated film, with a fair amount of moving camera and also a lot of movement from people within the static shots too. There are some nice shot designs, such as a sword fight between two men being looked down on through the struts of a balcony, the vertical bar separating and framing the duellists. And when a character called Dõna Ana stabs her four year old son to death before stabbing herself on the same balcony, falling back into her room, there’s a nice series of shots of her ghost getting up from her body and flying through the window wailing. This is followed by two more similar ghost effects from two different characters... the last of which doesn’t take place in flashback and, due to the startled onlookers, cements the movie as definitely being a horror film rather than just a thriller, as far as I’m concerned. 

Perhaps due to the differences between the US and Mexican culture (although the Hays Code didn’t come into proper enforcement in the US until 1934, so maybe I’m being a little naive here) the film pulls no punches. Both in the depiction... or at least implied moments... of child death by stabbing and, also, in the pools of flowing blood left behind with some of the adult victims of the character who is responsible for the killings in the contemporary sections of the film... who I’m guessing you’ll spot a mile off, even with the inclusion of a kind of ‘red herring’ character. 

So yeah, I really enjoyed this. But not as much as the absolutely brilliant extras. Indicator hasn’t managed to include as much as their usual plethora of special features but what is here is quality. Especially a wonderful 20 minute featurette called La Llorona: Ghosts Of The Past by Viviana García Besné, the great granddaughter of the films producer who was partially responsible for saving and restoring the last, badly damaged print of this film. It includes lots of really interesting facts about the movie and its origins and includes some home movie footage from both then and now which... well... let’s just say I found myself unexpectedly moved to tears as much as I was informed by this one. 

Secondly, there’s another great extra called Transcending Time, with Castillo Flores, head programmer of the Mórbido Film Fest, who looks at the origins of the La Llorona myth and its various incarnations in Mexican movies. He also mentions that the Americans have made a lot of versions themselves but, in a telling moment, he says he’d rather not speak about those ones. But he does have fascinating stories about the various origins and variations of the mythos and also, some nice stories from the filming of this version. For example, that balcony suicide scene? The actress in question was so into her role and the scene that she forgot the entire building was just a constructed front section with no actual room behind it. She flung herself backwards after her stabbing, into the room... forgetting there was no actual room (it was obviously in a different part of the studio) and would have plunged to her death had her expensive dress not go caught on part of the frame and saved her from falling. So, yeah, interesting anecdotes all round on the extras.

All in all, LaLorona is a really great Blu Ray edition of a film I might never have had the opportunity to see, had it not been for the heart felt efforts of Viviana García Besné and I’m really greatful to her and her partners in crime for making this available again after so many decades have elapsed. Definitely a must see for lovers of early horror movies and, heck, I sure wish I’d bought that slip case edition now.